Wednesday, November 5, 2014

In Progress

Are you wondering what I'm going to do with myself now that the garden is shut down?
I am working on several projects.
First, an interlinear Torah with Jewish Hebrew, Onkelos' Targum, Samaritan Hebrew, Samaritan Targum, Yehoash, and my translation into English. The Samaritan will be in the square letters which are so familiar to readers of Hebrew.
It comments on the differences between Jewish and Samaritan Hebrew. This commentary takes advantage of Dr. John A. Cook's doctoral dissertation on aspect and modality in Biblical Hebrew, which I used to write the second part of my Bit at a Time Biblical Hebrew page.
A future rewrite will include the Samaritan characters and the Athias/Usque Ladino.

This feeds into the third part of my trilogy of work:Fact-Checking the Torah (see blog page);Narrating the Torah (re-narrating the text based on Axel Olrik, John A. Cook, and modern archaeology as well as Jewish law; currently in rewrite based on Cook);Greeking the Torah (interlinear comparison of Septuagint, Massoretic and Samaritan Hebrew, based on John A. Cook; barely begun).

Greeking will show why it's a myth that Septuagint is more like Torah than Samaritan Pentateuch is. This myth arose in the middle of the 19th century in Lancelot Brenton's introduction to his translation of Septuagint into English. That people believed the myth -- and still do -- is understandable since the aspectual nature of Biblical Hebrew verbs and their modalities was not understood until the end of the 20th century. It's also true that Deissman and others had not yet studied the Nag Hammadi papyri; when they did, they found that Septuagint koine was not a Jewish dialect, or an Alexandrian one, but the same version of Greek used throughout Alexander's empire.

Email me if you're interested in Narrating or Greeking, or in a copy of the interlinear Jewish and Samaritan works.
There's an interlinear work on the web but after 30 years of Hebrew study, I find its English "equivalents" to be contextually inexact, and of course it doesn't reflect either aspect or modality. It would be great if you went to Interlinear Pentateuch to see this, especially once you get through the Bit at a Time Biblical Hebrew page, which should show you the reason for my comment.